I wouldn’t be a very good SEO provider if I didn’t practice what I preach, would I? SEO experience aside, at the end of the day I am a business owner and that means I need to market and promote my company in as many ways as possible in order to land new clients. One of those ways (obliviously) is through SEO. I’ve had many clients over the years tell me, “Well, I just searched for ‘Boston SEO company’ and I figured that whoever was at the top probably knew what they were doing!” As part of any strong SEO campaign, white hat link building is instrumental in your long term success. If you’ve never done any serious link building before let me tell you it’s not a quick, easy or particularly exciting process. One of the reasons many site owners turn to cheap link building services is because they don’t have the time (and time is money!) to do it themselves. And after all, if this company says they can get you 500 links for $50 that’s a great deal, right? Wrong!

If you invest in cheap link building services chances are it will come back to bite you in the end. Here’s why:

Cheap link building services tend to be outsourced overseas.

You can spot a blog comment written by someone from India or the Philippines a mile away. Is that the kind of activity you want going on behind your brand? At the end of the day it is your site that is going to suffer from low-quality link building services, not the company you outsourced your work to. Like I mentioned before, to do link building right takes an immense amount of time and someone somewhere needs to get paid for that time. If you’re only paying $50 for 500 links chances are your cheap link building provider isn’t paying American workers to handle the project.

Cheap link building services mean cheap links!

Because you’re paying so little you shouldn’t really expect your cheap link building service provider to put all that much time into your link building campaign. Chances are they’ll go after the easy-to-get (read spammy), low-quality links that might look good in spreadsheet but don’t actually provide that much SEO value to your site. I’ve even heard stories about cheap link building services building client links on sites they own. When the client cancels their contract the links vanish right along with it! So much for that investment.

Cheap link building service providers aren’t as transparent as they should be.

I’ve worked with several clients over the years that were burned by cheap link building services because they didn’t actually know what kind of links their provider was building. With a lot of smoke and mirrors the company basically said their link building process was proprietary and therefore the client couldn’t see what was going on. Excuse me? I’m not allowed to know what kind of work is being done for my site? Not every cheap SEO service provider is out to fleece you but hearing that makes me very nervous. How do you know they are building links at all if there is no record of activity? And what if they are building the wrong kind of links that could get your website in hot water with the search engines? In my opinion, transparency is crucial when working with an SEO service provider.

I know that when time and the budget is tight site owners look for the cheap and easy way out but when it comes to link building it’s just not worth it! No matter how inexpensive a link building service may be you’re better off saving your money and managing your own link building for a while. Even if you just build one quality link a day you’ll probably be better off in the long run than 6 months of $50 for 500 links.

About the Author

Nick Stamoulis is the President of Brick Marketing, white hat SEO company based in Boston, MA. With 13 years of experience Nick Stamoulis shares his SEO knowledge by writing in the Brick Marketing Blog and publishing the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, read by over 150,000 opt-in subscribers.